She looks like any other typical 17-year-old about to graduate from high school.
She wears jeans and sneakers. She works at a grocery store. She earns A's and B's, and plans to go to college.
But her classmates at a suburban Lancaster County high school do not know that every night she sleeps in a room with six women — who are strangers — inside the Water Street Mission.
"The first day, I was horrified," says the young girl, whom the New Era has agreed not to identify because of her age and the potential for social repercussions from peers.
"I don't want to be known as the homeless girl," she says.
She has more company than she realizes.
Nationally, one in 50 students is homeless, according to a recently published survey. Homeless students are living in motels, doubled up with other families, and sleeping in cars and shelters.
Due to the faltering economy, schools in cities around the nation are seeing more homeless students.
About 30,000 Pennsylvanians under age 18 are homeless, according to a 2008 estimate published on the Homeless Children's Education Fund Web site.
The national trend is beginning to impact Lancaster County, too.
Officials in the two largest public school districts, Lancaster and Hempfield, are seeing spikes in their homeless-student populations.
And while officials in the other 14 districts say they have not seen their homeless-student numbers grow, they are seeing more families asking for help: food, clothing, housing and counseling.
The combined student populations of Lancaster and Hempfield amount to about 27 percent of the county's total public school students.
Hempfield saw an increase of five homeless families from September to February, said Ruthann Crawford-Fisher, principal of the Rohrerstown Education Center and coordinator of district social services.
"A lot of people are losing their jobs," she said. "And they are just hanging on the fringe as it is."
School districts, overall, are seeing more students living in poverty or close to it. The number of the county's public school students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch increased 6.1 percentage points from the 2004-05 school year to the 2008-09 school year.
RELATED ARTICLE: Poverty-level students on rise Meanwhile, the phones have been ringing more often these days in Ken Marzinko's office.
He is the director of the Lancaster School District's homeless project. SDL has a nearly 80-percent poverty rate and more than 900 students who are homeless.
Due to the economy, the ranks of homeless students are growing, Marzinko said. His office has not tracked the increase yet, but he feels it, and he sees it.
"Most of the families we are hearing about were living paycheck to paycheck, and then they lost their job, and they did not have the savings and other financial resources to carry them over for a couple of months," Marzinko said. "Those families are falling into homelessness pretty quickly."
Amid the economic downturn, some families are turning their older children out of the house — teens who are 17 and 18, and in their last years of high school. They can't afford to feed them anymore, Marzinko said.
Hard times have been falling on families even in Manheim Township, one of the county's wealthiest districts.
"Due to the state of our economy, our district social worker has made a significant number of referrals to the Council of Churches food bank this year," said Marcie Brody, a district spokeswoman. "Some of these have been folks who live in very nice neighborhoods."
The families are struggling because they've lost their jobs, or their employers slashed their hours, Brody said.
Penn Manor School District officials are seeing similar trends.
"I probably made more referrals to the food bank in the last three months than I did in the last three years," Penn Manor social worker Deb Meckley said.
One well-known place of refuge for the homeless is the Water Street Mission, a division of Water Street Ministries, where the senior from the suburban high school lives.
The number of children living there rose from a monthly average of 34 in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 47 in the fourth quarter of 2008.
School officials believe there could be more homeless students than they realize.
When a family doubles up and stays with another family, they are still considered to be homeless.
And parents often tell their children to keep it a secret, Marzinko said. They fear that the school will kick the student out for not being in the right district.
But federal law prohibits districts from doing that. They must provide transportation to the home school. The point is to keep one area of the child's life stable.
Fisher said it's not the child's fault they are homeless.
"We want our kids to be safe, and we want them to know they are safe, and we are here for them," she said. "We are running kids from almost 40 miles away into school each day."
Fisher worries that as more people lose their jobs, homelessness and poverty will escalate.
In recent months, Hempfield teachers have noticed more children coming to school without lunch money because of parents losing jobs, Superintendent Brenda Becker said.
So the district has begun redistributing forms for free and reduced-price lunches.
The 17-year-old girl used to feel ashamed to eat a free lunch at her school. But now she's more worried about saving enough money to get a place to live.
She's been in Water Street with her mother since January.
It's been a rough few years.
She had come to Lancaster County from Delaware County in 2007 when her mother lost her job.
She was living with her father, but he died of cancer several months ago.
Her mother had moved in with them to help take care of her ex and her daughter.
But she hasn't found work.
The 17-year-old has been supporting herself and her mother with grocery-store paychecks and the Social Security payments she's received since her father's death.
Her mother looked for work everywhere, she said, but wasn't able to find a job.
The shelter has been stressful.
If she needs to write a paper for school, she finishes it in flex-time, which is like study hall. Her computer is at her boyfriend's house. She does not want someone to steal it.
She does get angry sometimes. She gets mad when she hears her classmates complain about not having the latest pair of jeans, when she hears that they fail school for stupid reasons.
"I wish I could tell them, look at what happened to me, at least I am thankful for what I have," she says.
Her life will not always be this way.
She's good with numbers; she wants to study business. She's been accepted to college.
"There is not much I can do to help my future right now," she says with tears streaming down her cheeks. "My resources are limited.
"I do hope. I do hope to do something good with my life."
Staff writer Robyn Meadows can be reached at rmeadows@LNPnews.com or 481-6025. 
